I interviewed Mitch McConnell for the first time when I was 17, and I was warned by my uncle who knew him well that he was about one thing and one thing only.
“What is that?” I asked.
“Mitch McConnell,” he said.
Kentucky’s 84-year-old senior senator is one of the chief architects of the MAGA Republican Party, and he is almost solely responsible for the makeup of the current Supreme Court. He has been absent without leave since June 14, apparently in a “D.C. area hospital” receiving “excellent care.” But for what, we have no idea, and few seem to care. McConnell is an inveterate political fly catcher who has survived in the back alleys and fetid filth of Washington’s political swamp.
Don’t expect members of my profession to track down the story. We’re too busy listening to Donald Trump berate NATO, lie about his investments, revive the Red Scare and call Iranian leaders “scum.”
Don’t expect members of my profession to track down the story. We’re too busy listening to Donald Trump berate NATO, lie about his investments, revive the Red Scare and call Iranian leaders “scum,” while at the same time declaring we’ve defeated Iran in a war everyone believes we shouldn’t have started in the first place. (For those keeping track, Trump has claimed he has ended the conflict close to 40 times. I can’t count how often he’s “completely obliterated” the Islamic Republic’s military, even though they keep firing missiles and sending drones against us.)
Meanwhile Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Houston gunned down Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old Mexican national who had lived in the United States for over three decades. He had no criminal record. He was married and helped raise three children while working in home construction. Witnesses say he was fatally shot for no reason while ICE agents claim he tried to weaponize his car.
Unless you pay attention to social media, you haven’t read or heard much about this story. But you’ve probably seen that Trump has started an “anti-communist club” and is advertising it with glee to his supporters. So you can’t expect us to march around and hunt for McConnell. Most of us don’t want to see him, and the only reason the GOP does is that they need his vote because Republicans have an exceedingly thin majority in the Senate.
Trump couldn’t care less what happened or will happen to McConnell. There has never been any love lost between them. On his return trip from the NATO summit in Turkey, the president told a gaggle of reporters he had no idea what happened to McConnell. The “and who cares” part was implied by Trump’s body language — a shrug of the shoulders. However, in the last few days, as speculation has run rampant and MAGA magpie Laura Loomer has declared that she knows McConnell is brain dead, at least two conservative leaders have come forward to say they’ve spoken with him in the last two days for “at least 20 minutes” — though they won’t say what’s wrong with him, why he’s in the hospital or why they suddenly spoke with him after Loomer’s declaration. Nothing to see here. Move along.
CNN anchor Kasie Hunt pressed Scott Jennings, the senator’s fellow Kentuckian and a GOP pundit for the network, to call him while they were on the air. Jennings demurred, though he too claimed he had a great 20-minute conversation with McConnell.
What’s most depressing about all these stories is that they pointedly highlight the problem with contemporary American media. Speculation runs wild as facts are few and far between.
Trump is able to go full “Tail Gunner Joe” McCarthy and dredge up the Red Menace by channeling his inner Roy Cohn because there is no Edward R. Murrow around to remind us that dissent is not disloyalty, and only evidence and due process can save us from what the legendary broadcaster called an “age of unreason.”
We are in the middle of that age. There is no other way to explain the fact that federal agents have gunned down at least three people — Araujo, as well as Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis — and no one has been charged.
In the case of McConnell, the Courier Journal, one of the best regional newspapers in this country — until the Bingham family sold it, along with its now-defunct afternoon counterpart the Louisville Times, to Gannett — used to have a team of reporters in Washington, D.C., covering Kentucky’s congressional delegation. In times past, the nation would have learned of the fate of the commonwealth’s senior senator because a bird-dog reporter like Al Cross would have tracked it all down and reported it. Today? Cross has retired, and that type of reporter no longer exists at the paper. We are left with the mindless tweets of Loomer and others who “heard from someone” — speculation they report as fact.
I’ve heard rumors too: that McConnell is in a coma or is perfectly fine or is resting comfortably in a private-care facility, spouting gibberish like a songbird on speed. None of it or all of it may be true. The only thing we know for a fact is that he hasn’t been seen nor heard from since mid-June when his office put out a statement saying he was doing great.
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I know people who work in his office in both Washington and Kentucky who are as in-the-dark as the rest of us. It’s easy to be closed mouth when you have nothing you can say. But McConnell’s absence has some potentially serious consequences.
A law passed in 2024 by the Republican supermajority in Kentucky’s legislature removes the ability of the state’s governor — in this case, Andy Beshear a Democrat — from appointing a temporary successor to the seat in the event of a vacancy. If this were to happen before Aug. 3, Beshear would call a special election. The process has never been tested, and right now former state Rep. Charles Booker, a Democrat, and GOP Rep. Andy Barr are squaring off for the seat McConnell is abandoning. This potentially chaotic mess is not only indicative of today’s politics, but it is also exacerbated by the fact that the Republicans have such a slim majority in the Senate that even a temporary vacancy could affect votes on nominees and legislation, and endanger the GOP’s control.
To my knowledge, no one has staked out McConnell’s residence or hospital. Few have questioned why his wife flew to China a few days after he was hospitalized. There’s no one on this story 24/7.
If McConnell were Taylor Swift, TMZ would be all over it. The outlet now has a Washington presence, but aside from posting the occasional update — such as “Meghan McCain wants ‘proof of life’” for McConnell — it too has been silent.
The simple reason why the facts aren’t known is that the American public doesn’t care enough to tune in, or at least those who run the media corporations don’t think the American public cares. Put another way: There’s no money in it.
Right now McConnell could be basking on the shores of Lake Barkley sipping mint juleps, and unless he was running from ICE or joining Swift and her husband Travis Kelce on their honeymoon, no one cares enough to cover it.
News has become stained with the cancer of opinion parading as facts. We only care enough to speculate — to raise our voices without ever digging into the meat of the issue. This goes for McConnell, the new “Red Scare” and every other major story in this country.
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I ran into a reporter this week who compared Trump’s recent actions to Ronald Reagan’s “original Red Scare” when the 40th president claimed Sandinistas were a day’s march from America’s southern border. When I mentioned that the “original” Red Scare was led by McCarthy in the 1950s, he said, “What are you talking about?”
Clearly we need to do our research a little better.
As speculation about McConnell has swirled, Beshear has been inundated with questions regarding the senator’s absence. In a July 2 press briefing, he said, “We have received no information. No updates. If there has been any direct outreach I am unaware of it. I don’t want to speculate about anybody’s health.”
Finally, fed up with a lack of answers, on Wednesday Beshear wrote a letter to McConnell and requested an update on his health, a move that escalated public pressure on the senator and his staff to come clean.
“Over the last several weeks, Kentuckians have grown increasingly concerned about the health and well-being of Sen. McConnell,” Beshear wrote. “As Governor — and a fellow public official who understands the commitment we’ve made to the people we serve — I am requesting the Senator provide an update on his current health status.”
At least the Kentucky governor’s office is operating as it should.
There is no question that we’re not doing the job in journalism. If you have to rely on a Laura Loomer tweet for information, you have “reached the great age of disinformation,” as a colleague said.
The rest of our government is questionable, and there is no question that we’re not doing the job in journalism. If you have to rely on a Laura Loomer tweet for information, you have “reached the great age of disinformation,” as a colleague said. “Evidence and due process are gone. It’s only what you feel. It’s only what you want to believe.”
As Murrow reflected, “The fault is within ourselves.”
The fault is also with McConnell. He has lied and manipulated the public from the beginning of his career when he tried to overthrow Kentucky’s GOP leadership. When he failed, he threw other young Republicans under the bus. I know people who left the Republican Party in Kentucky because of McConnell.
He made it on the national radar in 1984 with one campaign commercial. Finding himself trailing incumbent Democratic Senator Walter “Dee” Huddleston in the general election, McConnell produced a commercial that featured a hunter and some blood hounds trying to track down the Democrat, claiming he was never around to cast a vote in D.C. It was an outright lie, but it worked. McConnell defeated Huddleston by a margin of 5,269 votes. The guy who wrote and produced that commercial? None other than Roger Ailes.
McConnell then spent the next 40 years shaping the Republican Party and this country in his own twisted image. And now few care about his own absence from Capitol Hill, and even fewer reporters know how to find out.
It’s enough to drive a man to drink.
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by Brian Karem
The post “Where’s Mitch McConnell?” mystery exposes media failures appeared first on Salon.com.
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Hello, my name is Asma E Nur. I am a tech blogger.
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